SendinBlue Review – All-in-one Email Solution for Small Business

34-year-old Steve Jacob, has been running his own ad agency for 5 years now. This ad agency started with a mere five clients for the first two months. Fast forward five years and now Steve’s agency is among the best ad agencies of Chicago bagging 5 prestigious awards and recognition.

The secret of Steve’s agencies’ client retention rate being more than 85% is that they didn’t ignore nurturing their clients at the right moment. They struck the needs of their clients with the right marketing tactics out there. As the agency grew, their marketing needs grew exponentially and Steve knew the importance of retaining customers through email marketing. The agency now boasts of having 60 people on board and the technical team have tried and tested almost every email marketing solution for their sales funnel.

According to Hubspot Inbound report, 91% of consumers check their emails daily and 77% of consumers prefer email for marketing communications.

Since the consumers use the email as a channel of their own, it makes it imperative for the email marketing automation software to have all the features to make the emails highly personalized according to the buyer’s persona.

For the first one year of business, Steve’s engineering team was using Mandrill, which was working fine, until Mandrill announced to merge with MailChimp recently.

Update: As of 25 May Early 2019, GDPR is applicable in Europe and now SendinBlue is also GDPR compliant. It is providing features which help SendinBlue users to manage their European subscribers. These features include right to rectification, right to be forgotten, right to portability, right to object and right to access. You can find complete detail about SendinBlue GDPR and concent compliance from here.

Their marketing team was using Aweber and alternatives for sending email campaigns when the client base was manageable. Over time, as the demand increased and the client’s base increased, the marketing team shifted their email marketing operations to Aweber from Infusionsoft.

After restructuring, Steve’s marketing team decided that they needed an all-in-one marketing software for their use. After days of research and careful consideration of many services, they decided to use SendinBlue, which had all the feature they were looking for. Their expectations matched the requirements and they excelled in customer retention in no time with this fully automated, yet personalized email marketing software.

SendinBlue is a remarkable software that provides you an intuitive interface with a gamut of services and functionality, that the marketers bet it is the best in class email marketing campaigns software. How?

Let’s explore the features of SendinBlue

1. Email Campaigns

SendinBlue’s easy template designer which are mobile – friendly and personalized, is a help in need to the marketers out there who can also be creative without any designing skills.

Triggered Campaigns – or campaigns that are driven by targeting and behavior. Take this instance- You have a customer who has your products in his cart and you want him to pay? SendinBlue will detect that and send the prospect a personal email that would remind him of the cart and pay for the items in his cart.

2. Transactional Email and SMS

Want to ensure your customer gets his shipping notification? Are you finding it hard to make your prospects aware of the clearance sale that is going to happen next week? App Alerts and push notifications are all the features of SendinBlue that will make sure that your customers get the welcome SMS, order confirmation messages, shipping, and delivery information tracking, and other important alerts to reach their inbox. SendinBlue also has logs to search for the historical transaction emails and messages. Not only this, you can get delivery messages and engagement metrics to see what is happening to your SMS sent to the customers.

3. Marketing Automation and Workflow Creation

With SendinBlue you can create easy Automated Workflow channel which will allow you to create multi step and multi channel campaigns with unlimited variables in just a few minutes. This is the same marketing automation workflow design which we feature in Drip automation tool. But SendinBlue takes this to next level as you want to reach your customers through SMS or Email, through this easy management system, you will be able to choose the preferred device and reach your customers at the right moment and right time.

SendinBlue’s smart re-targeting function, allows you to track and engage with the visitors on landing pages. Segmentation and targeting is also easy. SendinBlue’s unique contact builder that segregate the prospects according to their age, city etc.

How is SendinBlue different from Aritic Pinpoint?

SendinBlue and Aritic PinPoint, if seen at a glance, will look very similar to each other. They both exhibit features that are common. The point of difference is, SendinBlue aims to offer everything, in a nutshell, touching upon all the features. Aritic PinPoint, on the other hand, is a full stack marketing automation application. It has all the features in-depth and is much more advanced.

For instance, SendinBlue allows email campaigns based on behavior, demographics, and multi-channel set up. Aritic PinPoint has all of these too, but with an extra edge. You can set up your campaign easily in fewer steps and trigger emails based on events, date, stage in which your lead/visitor/customer is in (every lead goes through three basic stages before they hit the buy button: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Read about it here).

How is SendinBlue different from MailChimp?

Apart from Mailerlite which only has email marketing feature, SendinBlue is another all-in-one MailChimp alternative that is very light on the pocket and very effective for small business. If you are in a fix as to which one to use for integrating all your marketing activities, then we provide you a comparative analysis that will help the users make an informed decision.

SendinBlue helps create professional looking email templates at the cost that is four times cheaper than MailChimp.

We should note that SendinBlue charges on per email sent basis while MailChimp charges per subscriber basis. So if the marketers have high number of subscribers and they can send them a low number of emails per month, then SendinBlue is a cheaper option.

SendinBlue is all in one solution for email marketing communication, whether it is Email Marketing, Transactional Emails, SMS marketing, Transactional SMS or Marketing automation.

SendinBlue’s user interface is attractive and easy to use. It’s clear simple drag and drop email builder, deep subscriber segmentation feature is another feature that SendinBlue is providing that has a solid competition with MailChimp.

MailChimp doesn’t let you send emails automatically under free plan, while SendinBlue, for unlimited time, does offer automation in their free plan itself. This, in turn, gives the users enough time to decide about the purchase – as to which service you ultimately want.

Founded by Armand Thiberge, who created this software to “democratize email marketing” and especially making the facilities available to small businesses, helped formulate an efficient, simple yet powerful alternative of MailChimp.

You can start integrating their MailChimp contacts to SendinBlue here.

How is SendinBlue different from Aweber?

Aweber doesn’t provide 24×7 support through phone or online, and pricing starts from $19 per month. Aweber’s users are devoid of good support. Aweber doesn’t provide SMS integration which is a very useful marketing technique used nowadays.

Aweber also doesn’t have ecommerce and web analytics feature which SendinBlue has.

While both have a free trial facility for the marketers, where the first time users don’t need to enter their credit card details to sign up in SendinBlue.

SendinBlue customers have the privilege of getting online, phone support and knowledge base which

Aweber can only support a subscriber base up to 25,000 while SendInBlue can support unlimited contacts.

Deep customer segmentation is not possible in Aweber but SendinBlue makes it easy. We have already talked about the importance of segmenting the campaigns in marketing, which Aweber is lacking, while one of the best catch for SendinBlue is the campaign segmentation feature.

SendinBlue integrations

WordPress and SendinBlue Integration

SendinBlue is a WordPress friendly solution for email marketing and plugin so you can keep their audience updated with all the awesome things that you are publishing and grow your business. You can send transactional emails via SMTP or APIs. SendinBlue WordPress integration has been kept very simple and easy to install for nontechies as well. After installation, you can start creating your campaigns from your WordPress website itself. However, SendinBlue free membership has a monthly limit of 9000 emails the newsletter builder is available for forever.

SendinBlue also allows the businesses operating in Prestashop to integrate the plugin in the website. You can start effective email marketing strategies, with the tools you incorporate, using SendinBlue. SendinBlue has always ensured to provide their customers with a very easy installations process. For installation, one need to log in with their PrestaShop account; going to extensions and adding a zip file – SendinBlue-Prestashop.zip. For the on screen installation process here to complete installation and start email marketing campaigns for the customers.

With the installation of SendinBlue, you can easily segment your customers or visitors on site and track their orders. With this tracking code for each visitor, it is easy to segment your customer according to who placed an item more than a certain amount. Even with the total amount spent you can create your campaigns. With this facility, SendinBlue makes it the best email marketing integration for the eCommerce merchants using Prestashop.

Magento is another ECommerce platform simplifying your product content management. SendinBlue comes with integration with Magento as well. Synchronizing SendinBlue with Magento is extremely easy and easy to manage. SendinBlue provides plugins you need to incorporate to effectively run your email marketing campaigns for your prospects and customers. SMS transaction is also done through the plugin that will quickly send an SMS when the order is confirmed and shipped. SendinBlue SMS service makes it easy to track, monitor and optimize the results with real time analytics and better user experience platform.

Setting up SendinBlue plugin is very simple. If Magento users don’t have a SendinBlue account, then they need to create one.

Some of the intuitive feature that helps Magento users are – easy segmentation of subscribers, newsletter builder, monitoring of transactional email templates and easy to use real time detailed reports. This also comes with a dedicated IP for the protection of reputation. All this comes with an unbeatable pricing that is the best in the industry.

SendinBlue Exclusive Focus for Small Business

SendinBlue is the most used email marketing tool used in small business, because of the pricing and all-in-one emailing tool. Being the direct communication between a brand and a customer, the beneficial aspects of email marketing for small businesses for retention and delighting the customers, cannot be overlooked. Even if someone is from a nontech background, i.e, having no knowledge of coding at all, SendinBlue doesn’t make it hard for them to operate. It’s professional looking HTML email are very easy to create. It is because of these factors that SendinBlue makes it difficult for the small business owners to think of any other alternative.

SendinBlue’s superior reporting and analytics system is very easy to interpret and with the help of the reporting system of telling the campaign owner – who clicked what – it becomes very easy for the person to target the customers who are inclined towards a certain product. With this information, the small business owner can make personalized emails to further attract a prospect.

Another review states that, by far, the best customer service has been that of SendinBlue. They are very quick to answer any technical query or any other kind of support needed. With the quick automate process, SendinBlue automatically generates newsletter of by curating information from the website and sent it to the contacts. SendinBlue has provided value to the small businesses by establishing all the functions that they need without having to pay a lot for it.

SendinBlue Price Plans

Enough of keeping you in dark, let’s come to money!

Let’s see how is SendinBlue an all rounder in email marketing software and still is easy on pockets for the businesses and freelancers. For beginners, it comes with storing unlimited subscribers details and 9000 emails per month, which is a free plan. The best part is, you don’t have to sign up with your credit card, unlike many other email marketing software to enjoy the privileges that SendinBlue provides.

Apart from real time reporting, mobile friendly email designer, email template library and personalization of emails, the prospects will be receiving the emails with SendinBlue logo. SendinBlue’s Micro pack has a limit of 40,000 emails per month with unlimited subscriber. Unlike the free plan that comes with daily sending limit, micro allows the users to send as many emails they require per day. SendinBlue’s micro is priced at $7.37/month.

Maintenance of business personal reputation comes with a price. The bronze pack allows the users to remove SendinBlue logo from emails that you are sending to your prospects.

Bronze pack also comes with an advanced reporting system that includes geography and device reporting, heat map reporting and an advanced statistics system that helps look for the open rate and click rate. It helps the marketers immensely to optimize the campaigns and take necessary steps to modify them, according to statistics. Bronze pack is priced at $39/month. Bronze pack users can send 60,000 emails per month.

Silver pack has the same facility that bronze pack provides with an additional 60,000 emails per month and is priced at $66/month. For all these features listed above and a dedicated IP, the business owners need to subscribe to gold/ platinum / diamond or atomic packs.

The email limit coming under these plans are:

Gold – 350,000 emails per month priced at $173 / month

Platinum – 750,000 emails per month priced at $334 / month

Diamond -3,000,000 emails per month priced at $603 / month

Atomic – 15,000,000 emails per month priced at $1946 / month

With these great features and advanced reporting system, SendinBlue is the most affordable email marketing solution out there for the business. BMW and Rakuten are the clients that SendinBlue boasts of. And why not?

29 Comments

SendinBlue pricing is very much effective which is no where like other service providers. I always love to use cpm for email campaigns and for last 4 years I have preferred it more compared to any other pricing models. Our team successfully configured to integrate Prestashop add-on which saved our time.

Exceptionally accommodating review. Much thanks! I’ve utilized SendinBlue As a part of way to convey month to month update to my subscribers at for my up and coming new items for a few years. The interface is so natural to utilize, the layouts are responsive so there’s no worries about arranging for particular organizations, and the site and messages are solid.

Very bad experience with SendinBlue. We’re just a small workshop who opened an Prestashop online shop and tried to create an account on SendinBlue. We had only 29 contacts because it’s our first online store. They didn’t want to activate our account probably because we’re small and we chose the freeplan for testing.

My name is Erin and I’m the General Manager for SendinBlue the in US. I’m very sorry to hear that you had a poor experience with our customer care team and service.

I would like to better understand your experience, and see if there is anything we can do to help make this situation right for you. Even if you are no longer using your SendinBlue account, I would be happy to hear your feedback, so that we can improve.

Please feel free to email me at contact@sendinblue.com attn: Erin and include the link to this post. I’ll be happy to assist you!

Nothing interest me more like having a straightforward and yet an extensive software, setting up the SendinBlue module just takes a couple of minutes and doesn’t require any specialized abilities. It’s quite simple to add new subscribers, manage contact lists, and create and send campaigns. Thanks for the SendinBlue Review.

Does Sendinblue functions efficiently for the small businesses? Sendinblue is a wonderful software which provides a highly interactive interface and a plethora of extraordinary services like email campaigns, marketing automation etc thereby creating a heaven for the marketers to work in.

Yes Dustin, SendinBlue is great all-in-one platform tool for marketing and sales to connect with customers over email and SMS. Recently, I tried SendinBlue automation; it looked good and has many convenient options for designing webflows for customer.

Awesome review. I wonder what you think about GetResponse marketing automation? I’m actually looking to move beyond email, but some of the marketing automation solutions are a bit too expensive or complicated.

Because of the fact that the emails are used by the consumers as their own channel, it becomes quite important for the software used for the automation of email marketing to get the feature for making the emails to be greatly personalized in accordance to the persona of the buyers.

I have a small business and SendinBlue tool gave me everything I wanted. It is not as expensive as other similar types of e-mail tools but it gave me the possibility to convert through my SMS to E-mail. Because it has a various number of e-mail templates, it gave me an easier way to contact my customers.

So SendinBlue basically enters the scene when the business has broke even and has a substantial base of subscribers. Or do you suggest people to use it from day one of their website getting launched. What is your ideal strategy with SendinBlue?

Hi Ankit, nice tool it is. And one can manages SMSes too in the same platform, along with marketing campaigns and transactional emails. But they do not give advanced reporting all the paid plans. At least give a glimpse of advance reporting if not the whole thing, what say?!

Hi Ankit, nice tool it is. And one can manages SMSes too in the same platform, along with marketing campaigns and transactional emails. But they do not give advanced reporting all the paid plans. At least give a glimpse of advance reporting if not the whole thing, what say?!

Very bad. SendinBlue requires lots of information about you and your client contacts, then declines to activate their ‘free’ account with 9,000 e-mail capacity. I uploaded +2,000 client addresses, my mobile phone number and address details with result of “declined” account. SendinBlue is likely collecting for spam purposes lots of e-mail addresses and mobile numbers. Beware.

The thing that I didn’t appreciate about sendinblue is the unavailability of tools to create landing pages. If you want to create elegant landing pages then you will have to use another application to achieve the same. Other auto responders come with this feature that sendinblue lacks.

Sendinblue comes with a straightforward interface that allows you to plan your marketing campaigns, manage your subscriber lists and send out event updates efficiently. The pricing plans are quite affordable as compared to its counterparts.